A Reflection on Dreams and Goals

 

At the start of the month, I shared with you some specific goals I had for January. Now that the month has ended, I wanted to offer up how they went! Some were great successes, and others didn’t work out as planned. All of it is okay! I’ve learned to hold the plans loosely. I pursue them as hard as I can, but if I find an insurmountable barrier, I trust that it wasn’t meant to work out at this time. Maybe later will be a better fit. Here’s how the month went in the land of goals:

ONE. This month I began slowly studying my way through the book of Exodus. I was so excited to begin. Spending a whole year in Genesis was far beyond what I expected to do, and while I don’t regret it, I also knew I needed to try to study a little faster starting this year, if I ever hope to finish a deep study of the whole Bible in my lifetime. The Lord kindly worked it out that my study book arrived on New  Year’s Eve, so I was able to begin my fresh start right on time on New Year’s Day! I allow myself a little extra time to be sure I’m fully immersed, but I am moving more quickly than I did through Genesis! (The study book from Precept USA is just one book instead of five, so it moves faster!) I’ve studied Moses’ life in depth before (because I wrote about it in one of my Bible studies) but I’m learning even more about him than I knew then, and the events of his life are perfect for what we are experiencing in ours right now. I'm currently in the middle of studying the plagues!

TWO. The YouTube course I found to learn more about my DSLR camera was four hours long, so I decided to break it up into four sections (one hour each) and learn that way. Sounds manageable, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. Not this month. Not with starting to read every day and trying to cook healthy meals at home every day and working out five days a week and working a full-time job and prepping to move. It may only have been a four hour course, but it proved to be four hours I didn’t have this month. I still want to do this, but I’m going to have to table it until things calm down a bit.

THREE. My book challenge is officially underway! My intent for the year had been to start with Redemptive Compassion, a book published by a former Love INC director, but our copies didn’t arrive in time. So I started with Like a Winter Snow (a short TV-movie-like novel by Lindsay Harrel), and that completed my “winter read” category. Then I moved on to Friends,Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry, which completed my “book everyone is talking about” category. Right about the time I finished that, Redemptive Compassion arrived, so I dove right in. This book didn’t mark off a category for me, but it was a convicting read. Then I started Devotedly by Valerie Elliot Shepard, which covers the "award winning nonfiction" category - and is also a book I've wanted to read for quite some time. I'll tell you more about it when I finished it. I'm about halfway through now. I wasn’t able to read a book a week, which I knew would be the case, but I did carve out time in each day to read a little bit in my books. If I had time for more, great! If not, I at least committed to reading a few pages.

FOUR. I just gave you a date night update a few days ago, but…we did manage to do one date each week! We did an at-home hot cocoa and TV night, a dinner night, a coffee night, and a double date night with friends. I felt like that was a wonderful variety and was proud of us for mixing it up!

FIVE. In the land of retreat prep, I surprised myself by getting much further along than I imagined possible. Praise the Lord for that! I not only made the outline, but I wrote all three sessions during January! This was only made possible by an unexpected holiday at work (I didn’t know we had MLK Day off work until that day), and I was so grateful for it. We have such a busy February ahead of us, and it will be a gift later that I am this far along in the process. Plus…the things I learned as I wrote were such a gift for this season of my life. I’m grateful!

In addition to my planned goals, I…

·       *  Exercised five of seven days each week.

·      

 * Fairly exclusively followed our clean eating meal plan.

·       * Helped Ryan at the lake house. (Because of my work hours, I’m rarely able to help at the lake, so getting to go over a little bit was a gift!)

·       *   Took down our Christmas décor and packed it all away using our new tub-labeling system that I devised.

·        *  Took a week of online training to learn more about grant-proposal writing.

·        *   Ordered SEVEN scrapbooks. (While I was out of work, I did not order any books to try to save money. I found a job. They ran a sale. YAY!) I also kept up with our current books and made significant headway on our anniversary book. I’m probably 95% done with it.

It was a productive month, and I am grateful for all I accomplished and learned!